Opium production rose to a staggering 6,100 tons in 2006, the highest ever recorded, and to 8,200 tons the following year, when Afghanistan produced 93 percent of the world’s heroin. In 2006 cultivation rose in Helmand by 162 percent, and there was an increase of 77 percent in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. In 2006 the opium sector contributed nearly half, or 46 percent, of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, which was now estimated at $6.7 billion. There was no doubt that the Taliban’s major offensive in the summer of 2006 was due largely to the enormous income it now accrued from opium. “We are seeing a very strong connection between the increase in the insurgency on the one hand and the increase in cultivation on the other hand,” warned Costa.
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In 2007 Helmand alone was responsible for 50 percent of the crop, or the equivalent of the total crop in 2005. Nevertheless, in 2007 thirteen provinces were declared drug-free, as the United States and UNODC had initiated a reward scheme in the shape of increased development funds for those governors and provinces that reduced production. The United States and European countries were now spending on average one billion dollars a year on counter-narcotics, but the effect in the south was still negligible.
Drug money was everywhere. It played a major role in the 2005 parliamentary elections. In a study, Andrew Wilder, a prominent American researcher based in Kabul, concluded that at least seventeen elected members of parliament were drug traffickers, while twenty-four were connected to drug gangs.
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In Kabul, multistory glass and concrete shopping malls with the city’s first lifts and escalators came up, as traffickers laundered their money through the construction industry. Huge, gaudy multicolored homes—some designed to look like the White House, others straight out of Disneyland—sprang up in Kabul’s suburbs, looking uncomfortably in-congruent next to the hovels of the poor, where plastic sheets kept out the rain and snow. New four-by-four vehicles and diamond-studded guns and watches became de rigueur for traffickers. There was another unseen cost: more than 170,000 Afghans, including 30,000 women, were hooked on heroin, consuming 90 tons of opium a year by 2005, and there were only a handful of clinics dealing with addiction.
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Drug money permeated the local government in every province, making it impossible to carry out the simplest development projects unless the drug lords cleared them first. Drug money paralyzed the building of a legal economy, as no industry, agriculture, or trade could compete with drug profits. People could not be persuaded to take ordinary jobs because the drug industry provided better salaries. Most significantly, drug money allowed the Taliban to pay and arm its troops, compensate the families of suicide bombers, and import new and better weapons while al Qaeda was able to reestablish training camps for international terrorists. In 2006 the State Department belatedly conceded that “Afghanistan’s huge drug trade severely impacts efforts to rebuild the economy, develop a strong democratic government based on the rule of law, and threatens regional stability.”
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U.S. and NATO forces still failed to develop either a coherent interdiction or an eradication strategy. “Even now, the Bush administration is disproportionately concentrating on the most visible, but least effective approach, forcible crop eradication, which merely moves the problem around and enriches traffickers by raising the price of their opium holdings,” said
The New York Times.
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In any effective counter-narcotics strategy, eradication had to follow rather than precede development and the creation of alternative livelihoods. A revival of agriculture had to take place across the board. This is what experts such as Barnett Rubin and I had argued to Andrew Natsios and USAID right after 9/11, and continued to argue to U.S. and NATO officials six years later—but to little avail.
The Afghan drug trade is sucking in all its neighbors as well. Traffickers in Afghanistan’s six neighboring states are all involved in exporting opium, with the accompanying ills of local addiction and corruption. After 9/11, UNODC and the U.S. DEA put in place Operation Containment, a project involving twenty countries in the region, designed to prevent precursor chemicals from entering Afghanistan and drugs from leaving, but its success has been very limited. The five Central Asian republics provide a major gateway for Afghan opium to Russia and Europe. All five states are weak, undermined by dictatorship and underdevelopment, and heroin has become an important means for the small, corrupt ruling elites there to enrich themselves. Meanwhile, intravenous drug use in the region is fueling some of the fastest-growing HIV/AIDS rates in the world.
Afghan opium has helped destabilize Tajikistan, which shares a 750-mile border with Afghanistan and is still recovering from its bloody civil war in the early 1990s. It is one of the poorest countries in the world and provides an easy target for both traffickers and drug abuse. The twenty-thousand -strong force of Russian border guards who once guarded the Afghan frontier is gone, replaced by poorly trained Tajik conscripts who are easily corrupted by the traffickers. There are now more than seventy thousand addicts in a country of just six million people. In August 2004, Ghaffor Mirzoyev, who headed the country’s Drug Control Agency, was arrested with a stockpile of three thousand weapons, including antiaircraft missiles. He was later charged with tax evasion, abuse of power, murder, and trafficking.
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Interpol investigators told me a year before 9/11 that they suspected leading politicians in Turkmenistan, including some in the office of President Saparmurat Niyazov, of being deeply involved in the drug trade. Turkmen dissidents in exile have made similar charges.
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In the late 1990s, I saw heroin being openly sold outside five-star hotels in the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat. Turkmenistan’s easily accessible border with western Afghanistan, along stretches of flat open desert, allow drug convoys to enter that country. The Taliban had a close relationship with the Turkmen regime in the 1990s, and Taliban leaders continued to frequent Ashgabat even after 9 /11. Opium was also transiting through Uzbekistan, enriching many in the government, while Kyrgyzstan provided an outlet for drug shipments to Xinjiang province in China, where there was a huge increase in heroin addiction. Heroin addiction in Central Asia was estimated to have increased tenfold since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
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The drug surfeit was most apparent in Iran and Pakistan. Iran has the highest proportion of opium addicts in the world, with nearly 3 percent of the population over the age of fifteen addicted to heroin, according to the UN. Only Kyrgyzstan and Mauritius pass the 2 percent addiction mark. Nearly half of Iran’s 170,000 prisoners are held on drug-related charges. Yet Iran has rigorous antidrug surveillance on its border with Afghanistan, having spent more than $1 billion on fences, ditches, and minefields patrolled by thousands of Iranian troops. Since 1990, some 3,000 Iranian security officials have been killed in battles against smugglers.
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The drug crisis in Pakistan is not much better. Pakistan was heroin free in 1979, but by 1986 there were 650,000 addicts, 3 million by 1992, and 5 million by 2000. Drug money has fueled criminals and smugglers and has allowed ethnic, Islamic, and sectarian extremist groups to arm and fund themselves. The country became a major route for heroin exports from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the 1990s, a role that increased after 9/11, when the Taliban were based in Pakistan. “Pakistan is part of the massive Afghan opium producing/refining system,” the State Department said in 2006. Pakistani traffickers financed Afghan poppy farmers as well as al Qaeda and the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban while they, the traffickers, supplied opiates to Turkey, Iran, and Europe.
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After 9/11, in 2002, opium growing started again in Pakistan, despite the country’s having been declared free of poppy cultivation in 2000. In 2002 poppy was being grown on sixteen thousand acres across the North-West Frontier Province. Afghanistan’s drug problem has now become a regionwide problem, fueling extremism and undermining governments.
Drug money was to play a major role in Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections. Just as there had been serious doubts about holding the presidential elections too soon, there were even greater doubts about holding the parliamentary elections so early in the regime’s life. The Taliban were resurgent, reconstruction had barely started, and there were insufficient foreign troops on the ground. Karzai was adamant that he wanted the elections held on time. Yet Karzai himself was to create major problems by delaying the resolution of vital issues—e.g., determining provincial and district boundaries, creating constituencies, and promulgating an electoral law— and by refusing to form a political party.
The UN asked for $148 million to conduct the elections, but the money was delayed by the donors, making preparation time far too short for what was already a risky operation. When Peter Erben, the UN chief electoral officer, arrived in Kabul in March 2005, he found his headquarters “a ghost town” and the Afghan-UN Joint Election Management Board (JEMB) was overwhelmed with responsibilities it could not fulfill.
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Civic education of the voters—so essential because most Afghans had no idea what they were voting for—started only ten weeks before the elections. Up to 50 percent of the population did not even know there was an election going on. Those who did had little idea what a parliament was.
There were to be two elections, one for the lower house of parliament— the Wolesi Jirga, or the House of People, with 249 elected members—and the other for provincial councils in all 34 provinces. A 102-seat upper house of parliament, or Meshrano Jirga, would have two thirds of its candidates elected by the provincial councils and one third nominated by the president. The lower house would also have two women elected from every province— 68 in all. The distribution of seats according to population estimates created major tensions, as there was no agreement on population figures. The Hazaras were incensed when Kabul received 33 seats in the lower house, while the two Hazara provinces of Bamiyan and Dai Kundi received only 4 each. Moreover, the voting system was incomprehensible to most Afghans and allowed far too many candidates to stand. In Kabul there were 390 candidates, and the ballot paper was seven pages long.
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Karzai had rejected the idea of the elections being based on political parties. Instead, the single non-transferable vote system was adopted—a complicated and wasteful method whereby each voter indicated only one favored candidate. The new parliament would consist of individuals with no party or group loyalty or manifesto.
The UN, the EU, and NGOs lobbied Karzai furiously to accept a party-list system, but he remained opposed. Every time we met, I raised the issue, but he would insist that parties were evil and reminiscent of the Communist Party system. Only the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, supported Karzai’s decision—and it was Khalilzad’s most disastrous mistake, as it undermined the very process the United States supported. Democracy without political parties was meaningless, as politics would continue to revolve around warlords. The lack of any viable party organization in the south would over time cost Karzai dearly as the Taliban insurgency spread.
There was little campaigning and few rallies. As name recognition and literacy were low, each ballot slip would show photographs of the 5,800 candidates. Drug money was more potent in wooing voters than manifestos. Almost all the former Mujahedin warlords stood for election, as did several former communists and Taliban and a dozen former members of Hikmetyar’s Hizb-e-Islami, who had all made their peace with the government.
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The Tajik Panjsheris under Younus Qanuni’s leadership forged an alliance of non-Pashtuns called Jabahai Tafahim Millie, or National Understanding Front, made up of fourteen political groups. The Front put up 500 candidates in opposition to pro-Karzai candidates.
The Taliban tried (and failed) to disrupt the election campaign, killing eight candidates, but everyone expected the worst on election day. On September 18, six thousand polling stations opened to receive voters. It was clear that there was nothing like the euphoria or public participation generated by the 2004 presidential elections. The public turnout was just 53 percent, compared with 73 percent in the presidential elections and 90 percent in the indirect polls for the first Loya Jirga.
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The turnout in Kabul was a poor 36 percent, while in troubled Zabul province it was just 13 percent. The final results were not declared until November 13, nearly two months later, due to disputes over the stuffing of ballot boxes.
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The low turnout was a reflection of growing public disillusionment with the government. Voters had seen the warlords win seats and realized that despite their promises of reform, Karzai and the United States just wanted to maintain the status quo. Even after General Fahim’s removal, Karzai had merely continued to shuffle warlords around in an endless game of musical chairs as they held on to posts in the cabinet or the provinces. Not a single senior official was removed or retired for drug trafficking, corruption, or maintaining an illegal militia. One of the key reformers in the cabinet, interior minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, resigned in a mood of “anger and frustration.” Jalali said Karzai was unwilling to take on drug traffickers, while Karzai alluded to corruption on Jalali’s part—whatever the reason, the two men fell out badly.
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Karzai’s other promise—to start taking responsibility for the human rights violations over the past three decades— was delayed indefinitely. Even to his close supporters, Karzai appeared to be weak and indecisive, refusing to take the bold steps that were needed to counter Taliban propaganda and retain public support.